Most (all?) of them are in the biomolecular engineering track and none in the bioelectronics track (because the EE undergrad director has a mistaken notion about what sort of course I’m teaching, thinking that it must be high-school level electronics, because the bioengineers aren’t EE students, and so he won’t accept my course as a prereq for any EE courses). Their being in the biomolecular track means that they don’t see circuits as an integral part of their training. I’ve tried to make the labs come as close to biomolecular stuff as I can, while still keeping them feasible.

I’m certainly using some constructivist practices in my circuits class, as the class is centered on the designs they do in the labs, not on the lectures, and I’m asking my students to build mental models that they can use to solve design problems, rather than spoon-feeding them formulas. It is not as easy as you seem to think to get students to “own the problem” and many of them get stuck very early, so I find it necessary to give them assistance earlier than a pure “constructivist” would.

Given the rather low success rates of the Ed Departments of the US in training teachers to teach students to think like engineers, I’m not sure I want to listen to them spout off on their current theories about how I should teach. I read a lot of teacher blogs and some education literature (mainly by computer science, math, and physics teachers), looking for teaching techniques that have been successful and that I think I can adapt to my classes. I’m looking more for “content pedagogy”—specific misconceptions students have with the material I’m trying to teach and ways to get students past those misconceptions—than for generic “how to teach” information.

And yes peer learning is the best learning. Head over to the Ed Department, and you’ll hear all about “constructivism:” essentially, social learning. Give them a problem and just enough info to start work as a group. Let them progress until they get stuck, and then give them _almost_ enough information to get to the next point. So that they’re always experimenting. And when they’re well and truly engaged in the problem solving, _then_ you stop and give them a lecture — which they will listen to intently, because they recognize that it gives them the way forward on the problems that they’ve already engaged in together, and own.

They teach all the students in the MA Teaching program about constructivism; too bad there’s no place for it in the public schools, or darned little. Why I didn’t become a teacher.